Death Echo

bent, tugged the hatch up, and was almost blown back by the unbridled thunder of the diesels. If the door had been installed between the machine space and engine room, obviously the cousins had left it open. With a grimace, she secured the hatch and eased down the steep, built-in stairway, clinging to something every inch of the way.
    At the bottom she saw ear protectors dangling from a clip, grabbed them, and shoved them on over her smaller headset like oversized earmuffs. The bruise on her forehead rewarded her carelessness with blinding pain, but the assault of sound diminished to a bearable roar.
    Sacks and satchels of tools lay scattered around. Either the cousins were messy, or the Blackbird ’s wallowing had tossed things about. Probably both.
    Staggered by the occasional jagged spurts of pain from having had her head banged against the sink, she began crawling carefully from bag to bag. Soon she had a selection of tools that might serve as splints. She emptied a small satchel into a larger one, filled the smaller one with her choices, and headed upstairs.
    By the time she scrambled out of the space and closed the large hatch, Mac had found the best line for taking the waves and cut the speed back a few knots. As a result, the boat had settled down into something resembling the other Blackbird ’s usual grace.
    Mac was pale, sweaty, drawn. Somehow he had put a compression bandage around his thigh. The heavy elastic was already dark with blood.
    Emma knew he was going to feel worse before it got better, but there was no help for that. The wrist had to be splinted. She peeled off the heavy ear protectors and set them on the pilot seat.
    â€œThere’s a shot of something like Novocain in the kit,” Mac said hoarsely.
    Emma reached for the small red zipper case. It was already open and messy, like Mac had been sorting through it. Despite the surging waves and her throbbing skull, she found and set up the numbing shot quickly.
    â€œI’ll do it,” he said.
    Before she could argue, he grabbed the syringe and shoved the needle into his broken wrist. She braced him when his body shuddered in pain, then took the empty syringe when he was finished.
    Sweat ran down his face.
    â€œTell me when it’s numb,” she said roughly. “I’ll steer.”
    â€œSplint it now or I’ll do it without your help.”
    Emma choked back her protests. Mac knew more about field medicine and the engine room of any ship than she did. If what theyboth feared was true, there was no time to educate her. He had to do the work himself.
    Teeth clenched until they ached in time with her pulse, she measured the tools against his injured wrist. She selected two wrenches and wrapped them into place. Duct tape was good for more than handcuffs.
    He kept steering. And sweating.
    She was sweating, too.
    â€œI’ll make a sling,” she said, turning away.
    She pulled Temuri’s knife out of her belly bag as she went to the back of the salon and turned her little flashlight on. She knew that she’d probably have nightmares about Temuri’s open eyes staring at death, glassy in the cone of her flashlight, but that was for later.
    Right now she needed his shirt for a sling. She leaned down and went to work with the already bloody knife.
    As the worst of Mac’s wrist pain let up, the knife wounds in his left side felt like they were on fire. He’d already put a compression bandage on the thigh wound. The other one was on his hip, too high for anything close to a tourniquet. He knew that the steady blood loss from the wounds would bring him down, but he didn’t know when.
    Mac forced himself to concentrate on the readouts and settings on the console behind the wheel. It didn’t take him long to confirm that the starboard trim tab was locked down on maximum. The port tab wasn’t being used at all, which meant that something on the port side of the boat was heavy enough to require a lot of compensating with the opposite trim tab.
    He fought a wave of dizziness and nausea. He would rather have been wrong about Blackbird ’s bad trim.
    But he wasn’t, so he went through the tools remaining in the little satchel by touch. As he’d hoped, a telescoping rod had caught Emma’s eye. Holding the wheel on course with his right thigh, he put the rod between his teeth and clamped down.
    Emma reappeared with stinking strips of Temuri’s shirt. Silently she knotted them